The Vatican Princess

by C. W. Gortner

  But the chamber itself was luxurious, with a four-poster bed adorned in rumpled carnelian brocade and a fresco covering an entire wall, depicting a fanciful landscape of swaying trees, saffron skies, and a shimmering city. As I picked my way to the mural to examine it, I heard Juan say, “The samples are in my antechamber,” and I realized he must have brought me through a back door rather than the proper entrance, which would explain why I had not seen any guards. I had to smile again. Back staircases and back doors: Juan was indeed a changed man.

  Then I froze, staring at the mural. It was a desert scene, with its whitewashed city like a mirage on the horizon, dominated by a high minaret and shaded by leaning palms. Turning around slowly, I espied a jumbled pile of belongings by the bed. I started to inch toward them, recognizing an odd-looking brazier with a peaked lid that was not of Roman design, as well as a quilted leather pillow embroidered with crescent moons. I had seen one just like it in my mother’s house, when Pope Innocent’s Turkish hostage first arrived after fleeing his brother the sultan, bearing a multitude of gifts that Papa purloined for Vannozza.

  Djem. I was in the dead Turk’s rooms.

  As horrified understanding swept over me, the door opened behind me, and Giovanni said, “Did I not say you would have cause for regret?”

  He shut the door, turning the key in the lock. As he stood there, a taut smile on his lips, I felt every nerve in my body start to clamor. I had to grasp the bedpost to stop my knees from giving out beneath me. I watched him enter, my mind unable to grasp that he was even here. He couldn’t be. He had left Rome. I must be imagining this.

  “What…why are you here?” Despite my struggle to remain composed, my voice betrayed my mounting fear. “I was told you had gone to Pesaro.”

  “I did.” He took a step toward me, his hands reaching to the lacings of his codpiece. “You are still my wife. I told you in that note that when I summon, you will come—willingly or not.”

  I threw a desperate look over my shoulder, at the doorway through which Juan had disappeared. “Juan is here with me. He’s in the next room. I will scream if you—”

  “Do so.” Giovanni pulled off his codpiece. I backed away as he approached, until I was fully against the bed. I could retreat no farther. He must have read my intent as I looked again to the other door, for he moved swiftly, lifting the dagger in his other hand.

  “Resist me,” he breathed, “do anything except what I tell you, and I’ll make sure you bear the same scar as your brother—on your face and everywhere else I can put this blade.”

  His eyes were dull as pebbles—unvarnished, unblinking. Unfeeling. I had seen that look before, on the night he came to me in Pesaro. On that night, I had felt this same paralyzing fear and I had not fought back. I had not been prepared. But our circumstances had changed. He must have returned like a fugitive, skulking into the city and the Vatican without anyone knowing. Papa would have his head for it. If he dared lay a finger on me, he’d never leave Rome alive.

  I swallowed the metallic tang of terror and said, “Sancia was right. You are a brute.”

  He lunged at me, clamping a hand over my mouth and smothering my shriek as his other hand came up. The chill of his blade was a sudden cold shock against my skin.

  I bit down as hard as I could into his palm; I tasted his blood and felt the recoil in his body, pressed against mine. He did not let go. With a savage thrust, he rammed me against the bed, the hilt of his knife on my throat, cutting off my air. I thought he would kill me. He would slit me open and I would die here, in Djem’s rooms. By the time Juan came back from wherever he had gone, he would find me lying in a pool of my own entrails.

  Giovanni snarled, “Do not make me do it. Do not make me ruin that pretty, lying face. Because I will. I will carve you in pieces like a spring calf.”

  He pressed harder on the hilt. As blood pounded in my temples and my lungs shrieked for breath, as the room and everything else in my world darkened and faded into a terrifying eclipse where all I saw, all I heard or felt, was his contorted face, his other hand grappled and tore at me, rucking up my skirts.

  “Spread your legs. Now. I know you can. I know you have done it before, for your brother Cesare and your father and God knows who else. Do it!”

  I was gasping, drawing in desperate breaths through my nose, while his fingers poked at me, digging like splinters.

  “Dry as sand,” he grunted. Seizing hold of me by my bodice, he hauled me around and flung me onto the bed. It was all I could do to cling to consciousness. My throat felt crushed; I knew that if I screamed, I would barely make a whimper. But I was not about to succumb. I was not going to lie here and let him violate me. Kicking out my legs, I felt the impact and heard his sudden groan as my heels connected with his groin. I longed for anything sharp. I wanted to stab him with it again and again, until he lay bleeding at my feet.

  “Si cagna!” He clouted me on my temple. My ears rang as if cymbals crashed inside. Pushing his hand firmly between my shoulders, he started hitting me, anywhere he could, and as he did I sensed his excitement, his pleasure in the pain he inflicted, and I struggled even more, knowing what was about to happen, what he was about to do—

  “You idiot. What is this?”

  Everything went quiet. I was suffocating, my face pressed into the bed; as I jerked my head to one side to gulp a draft of air, slow footsteps came toward us.

  Juan. He had come back in time. He was here, and Giovanni was doomed.

  I must have made a sound, a frantic plea, for Giovanni hit me again. As I fought to stay awake and not tumble into the churning darkness in my head, Juan drawled, “Is this how you intend to do it? Everyone will know she was unwilling. She’ll be bruised as a Trastevere slut after a brawl.”

  “I cannot,” panted Giovanni. “Look! I have no manhood. She—she does something to me. She is a strega. A witch. She has cursed me. She steals away my vigor.”

  Juan let loose a derisive guffaw. “No wonder she has cursed you. Is that all you have to show for yourself, that flaccid little worm? Why, you’re barely at half-mast. I could get a rise out of you, though. I remember how you used to beg me for it.”

  Giovanni bleated; I heard him stumble back as Juan growled, “Let me show you how this is done. Hold her down.”

  Panic erupted in me, white-hot and searing. I had hoped Juan would save me, strike down Giovanni and drag him off to be arrested, imprisoned, garroted in the piazza like the common thug that he was. Yet even as I started to writhe, trying to turn myself over and use my teeth, my fingernails, anything I could to stop them, Giovanni’s hands slammed down, immobilizing me.

  “Let’s turn her over,” he said gleefully, and Juan replied in a cold, cruel voice that cut into me like fangs, “No. I don’t want to see her face. I’ll take her from behind.”

  When I felt my brother move behind me, kicking my legs apart, I let out an inchoate wail that I could not believe had issued from my lips, from those of any human being.

  And as he leaned over me, Juan whispered, “This is for my Djem. For what Cesare did to him,” and a terrifying wave of understanding crashed over me. Somehow he had found out that Cesare had murdered his beloved companion. Djem had been more than an exotic pet he’d tethered with his leash—they must have been lovers, as he’d been with Giovanni and Giulia. Djem had not been waiting outside that door on the night I happened on them; the Turk was there because he was about to join them.

  My very soul fled my body as Juan plunged into me. I felt nothing. I became a shell, a hollow piece of flesh as he bucked against me and Giovanni howled with delight.

  After what seemed like a nightmarish eternity, I felt Juan shudder in release.

  Blinding pain overcame me as I felt him yank his member out. I was back inside my ravaged body, cowering in a raw corner of my being and hearing myself whisper, “No. God, please…”

  “Let me,” Giovanni said. “I am hard now. See? Let me at her.”

  “No.” Juan’s hands were
on my garments: arranging, smoothing, settling—gentle, as if I were a child who’d taken a tumble.

  “But you said— What about me?” Giovanni cried. “I’ll be made a fool, my name dishonored throughout Italy! As soon as they return from Ostia, your father and Cesare will petition the Curia for the annulment. She will accuse me of not consummating our union. She told me so herself!”

  “It is the truth.” Juan gathered me up in his arms as if I weighed nothing, setting me on my feet. As my gown fell about me in rumpled folds, I swayed, blinking rapidly as the room spun around me. He was holding me upright. I felt poised on the edge of a precipice.

  “But you said you would help me! You said you—” Giovanni halted, seeing something in Juan’s face that I did not, for my hair was a tangled curtain through which I could only discern fractured images: the guttering flame in the candlestick, the squashed shape of a heel-flattened tunic on the floor, the crescent moons on the pillow in the corner.

  “Listen to me.” Juan’s inflectionless tone reminded me of my father. “You will leave tonight. You will return to Pesaro and hide in your stingy palazzo that reeks of fish and poverty. You will hide and you will pray, with all your might, that she does as I tell her and doesn’t seek revenge through Cesare, my father, or any rogue she can hire. Pray she only accuses you of non-consummation and you survive with dishonor on your name instead of a Borgia blade in your gut. Now, get,” Juan said. “Get from my sight before I kill you myself, you miserable Sforza.”

  With a sob, Giovanni turned, unlocked the door, and staggered out.

  “Can you walk?” Juan asked me. When I did not answer, he added, “Here, let us try,” and he let go of my arms and slid one hand about my waist. My knees buckled. Horror washed over me, a blackness so deep it was like a refuge. His grip on me tightened. Fighting to retain the last of my shattered strength, I made myself stay upright.

  “Now stand still and let me see.” Juan stepped in front of me, parting the scrim of my hair, tucking its disarray behind my ears so that my face was exposed. “Oh, no. That idiot broke your lip.” His fingertip touched me. “Can you feel this?”

  Every part of me, every sinew and nerve, recoiled. I wanted to whirl about and flee, shrieking, into the corridors, rousing everyone from their beds and gaming tables or seductions, so that the guards and courtiers, the cardinals and my father himself, came rushing from behind their doors to discover that Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia and beloved of Pope Alexander VI, had violated his own sister.

  Instead, primal instinct took hold, something more powerful than the mindless urge to escape, making me stand quiescent while he probed my lip.

  “If you do not feel it,” he said, “then it looks worse than it is. But we should still tend to it. Wait here.” He started to step away. Then he paused, glancing over his shoulder. “Wait,” he repeated, as he might instruct an impatient hound or one of his horses. When he saw that I did not move, he went into his antechamber.

  My eyes lifted to where Giovanni had left the key in the other door. I saw myself running to it, throwing the door open. I could hear my cries for help already sundering the quiet of the Vatican. Papa was still here; he hadn’t left for Ostia yet. I still had time to—

  Juan returned with a basin and cloth. “Sit,” he said, and I perched on the side of the bed, aware of a dull ache between my legs. Kneeling before me, he wet the cloth and cleaned my lip. As he dipped the cloth again to moisten it, blood swirled in the water, threading it with pink.

  “Now you must do as I say,” he said, dabbing the edges of my mouth. He glanced into my eyes, which I kept fixed on him. He smiled. “Oh, I know you want nothing more than to go to Papa. I know you want Giovanni and me to pay for this with our lives. I understand. No one knows more than I how we crave revenge when that which we hold dear is taken from us.” His hand wiping the cloth on my face trembled. “But you will not tell anyone until we know for certain. You will wait and abide, no matter what. Do you understand?”

  The relentless intensity of his stare was making me sick. I swallowed again. When my voice finally crawled its way out my throat, it was a whisper: “Why?”

  He cocked his head. The gesture gave me a jolt. It reminded me again of our father. It was uncanny, terrible, in truth, how much he had come to resemble Papa—and I despised him all the more for it. He had no right to look anything like the man who had given us life, who would see him torn him apart limb by limb for what he had done this night.

  “Why?” His chuckle tugged at the wound on his face. “Because you may conceive.” He did not look away from the sudden fear that must have flared in my eyes. “It can happen. It certainly did with my wife. My seed is potent: I gave her a son with one thrust. Should the same happen to you, you’ll have to explain who the father is. You’ll have to admit you bedded with me or that Giovanni Sforza actually did what Papa and Cesare are so eager to say he did not. It will change everything—for you. Should word get out that you’re with child, it will wreck any plans they have for you.”

  “Plans?” I heard him through a dull roar in my head, as if he were a thousand miles away.

  “Yes. Another marriage. Or did you think they’d free you of Giovanni and leave you alone? You are too valuable, their new alliance. But in order for them to use you, you must remain a virgin—la immacolata Lucrezia, on auction once more. Who shall bid the highest?” His acid mirth faded. “But if you fail to do as I say, if you cross me in any way, I will tell them myself. Only they will hear how you came upon me and asked to visit my rooms to see the samples. And how, without any provocation on my part, you put your hands on me. I am but a man, weak of flesh, confused by battle and my wound, so alone and far from my wife’s comfort. You, so lovely, so sweet, offered me solace; you assured me it was not a sin, not between us. Mea culpa.”

  His words dug like talons into me. “Who do you think they will believe?” he said. “His Grace the Duke of Gandia and Gonfalonier, appointed by His Holiness himself to lead his army? Or the wayward daughter whose own husband ran away from her, whom they must keep pure? Perhaps it doesn’t matter who is to blame. It is still incest. They will lock you up in a convent until you die, and once the scandal fades and I do my obligatory repentance, I will still be Papa’s son.”

  My mouth tasted of ash. Gathering whatever spittle I could, I spat in his face. It hit him on his wound, dribbling down the side of his damaged cheek.

  “When Cesare finds out, he will kill you,” I whispered.

  “I suppose he will try, if he finds out.” Juan sat back on his heels, dropping the cloth into the basin. His face hardened, so that any similarity he had to Papa vanished, revealing another face under that insouciant one he displayed to the world—the one I’d once seen dripping with gore outside Adriana’s palazzo.

  He gripped my wrists. “But let me warn you now, sister. If he finds out, you’ll have only yourself to blame. I have no compunction about killing Cesare. I’ll grant no quarter this time. None. Just as Cesare gave none to Djem, just as he never gave me any when we were growing up, always whispering behind my back and ridiculing me.”

  Although I knew it was dangerous, even lethal, although my entire body reeked of him and his seed was still wet inside me, I had to smile. “You did this to hurt Cesare?” And something cold and implacable forged inside me, like a new blade. “This is how you take revenge against him, by violating your own sister?”

  “Fitting, isn’t it? Cesare thinks he’s so sly, advising Papa that I am a fool, a useless profligate who cannot even take a castle from that Orsini sow. He plots to see me stripped of my rank and my duchy, of everything he’s always wanted and Papa gave to me. But now I have paid back every insult, every time he made me feel as if I were unfit to call myself a Borgia. Now I have taken the one thing he desires more than anything else but could never have: you.”

  I saw his true hatred then, the virulent lifelong rivalry he could never purge. It reminded me of an evening a lifetime ago, when Cesare slipped into Ro
me unannounced and Juan came upon us, determined to humiliate, demanding that I kiss him.

  Juan pulled me to my feet, yanking my arms behind me and pushing me to the door. “But only you and I will ever know. We have our own little secret now, Lucrezia. Every day our brother looks at you, thinking you so innocent, cherished and protected, only you and I will know how soiled you truly are.” He put his mouth to my ear. “And don’t think of trying to rid yourself of it or confiding in your women. All those back-alley crones with their herbs and amulets—more often than not, they end up killing the mother and the child. A bad death, too, by all accounts; I’ve heard of whores puking poison or drowning in their own blood after the hook got stuck in their womb.”

  He released me. “Open the door.” When I did, he gathered a cloak from the pile on a nearby chair and draped it over me. “Walk.” He stayed behind me; I could feel the tip of his dagger through the cloak, poised at my back. As he took me down the stairs into the deserted halls, my footsteps echoed in bitter mockery of my own carelessness. I’d willingly gone with him. I had known who Juan was since our childhood, and still I had let sympathy overrule caution. I had stepped into the very snare he baited. Now I had to live with the consequences.

  For he was right, I thought, as he led me in a stunned haze to the Sistine and the door that led to the hidden passage to my palazzo. In the end, it did not matter whom they believed.